Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Sunday August 14, 2005 @09:22AM
from the nothing-else-happening-today dept.

computernut writes "Supervillains seem to like Linux. Take a peek at a cool Shockwave Animation on why they use it." Cute little animation. I think we might have shown it here before, but hey it's Sunday, and August which means this is the closest thing to news we might have all day.

Heh. Nowadays, the problem is figuring out how to block flash.For instance, I've installed FlashBlock and PrefBar several times in mozilla and/or firefox. They both test out ok, and work for a week or two. Then one day I find a movin' pitcher running in a moz or FF window, check, and sure enough; it's flash. F'r instance, flash was blocked a few days ago in FF, but when I pasted this comic's URL into a FF window, it came up and ran instantly.

I suspect there is an ulterior motive. Ellen Feiss [gloriousnoise.com] of the those Apple switch commercials may be involved. Those came out when she was 15 in 2002, it's 2005 now she should be turning 18 soon. I suspect that a editor came across an old pic of her and couldn't find out when she turns 18, hence the posting.

Well ok, time to reopen that issue and find out. Considering the current crop of vacuous airheads that are living in their 15 minutes now at least we know that one uses computers. I doubt she will ever say '

I believe you meant no remove root exploits in the default installation in the past N years. OpenBSD is by far the most secure operating system there is.

As for NetBSD not bringing alot to the community, my roommate and uncle just came back from Linuxworld as part of the NetBSD team (you may have seen pictures of their toaster.) NetBSD is designed for ease of portability. People often bicker and argue about which runs on more platforms: NetBSD or Linux. While it's a toss-up between NetBSD and the Linux

..but at least he's honest about it. Doesn't fucking bother capitalizing August or Sunday, doesn't care to look up if it's a dupe.

*gasp* He's just another lazy computer geek! Everyone, get the pitchforks and torches! We're supposed to all be pissed off cuz he's getting paid to be a lazy geek! We're supposed to gripe about having subscriptions and.. o, wait, I'm an AC.

He could've just not posted any new articles, keeping the ones that are there on the main page so we can discuss them more.Why we used to love/.: In the good ol' days, Taco and Hemos posted an article when there was something to post, maybe once an hour, maybe once a day. Articles stayed on the front page for days, and we managed to have meaningful discussions about them.

Why we don't love it anymore: There's now a quota of one article per hour (or one per 2 hours during USA-side nights and weekends). This

Don't laugh. Darl McBride actually mentioned this animation in his Long Live Unix [groklaw.net] letter. He was making fun of the "First you have to config it, then write some shell scripts, update your RPMs, partition your drives, patch your kernel, compile your binaries and check your version dependencies..." part, but he raised this obviously humorous animation as a serious criticism of Linux.

Oh, come on. That video is old. Now there are lots of high-quality games for the Mac [amazon.com]. There's World of Warcraft! (uncomfortable pause) And Myst... the Sims 2... ooh, Starcraft! And Diablo II! And the Oregon Trail. I used to love that game.

Yeah, there's this Flash movie of an old video game animation, which is really badly translated from Japanese, and the evil guy says "All your base are belong to us", and then there are lots of photoshopped photos with that text photoshopped into them photographically, and it's all like OMFGPWNZOR ALL YOUR BASE IRLBBQ!!!11one

That's a good one, but I seem to remember an even funnier one with a guy that starts yelling in his ranting about Windows/PCs... I think it also featured the 'switch ads' background music. But I've forgotton where I downloaded it. Damn... I was talking about this the other day as well, co-incidentally.

If anyone remembers this ad please reply to this post! I'd dearly love to see it again.

August is traditionally a slow news month. The US Congress is out of session. A lot of people are on vacation. People don't usually make major announcements. Maybe tech could be different, but as the article says, "News for Nerds" is a little thin on the ground.The other key word is "Sunday", meaning no companies issued press releases yesterday or today. If a company has done something interesting (and face it: in the tech world a lot of stuff gets done by companies) it comes out either as a press rele

This thing is called Flash for 5 years already! And previously it wasn't simply Shockwave, but Shockwave Flash. Shockwave is the name of Macromedia Director's internet format and entirely different technology.

I had a vivid and specific memory of Slashdot last posting this, and I can date it 'cos I remember showing it to the goddam beret-wearing Mac freaks (us Linux/Slowaris/mod_perl folks had a friendly rivalry going with the shapemakers.) At the time I was working at a dotcom that went tits-up in July 2001. I only started there in October 2000, so that makes the Flash four to five years old.

See how much has changed since then, as the Linux revolution in ease of use and consistency has swept the world's desktop

BTW, I saw "Stealth" last night. Check out the Seattle ubergeek's secretary in the last half hour. Does anybody think Bill has a secretary that looks like that? She had legs that could span Puget Sound.

Now, if I ever get my AI working, I definitely would have a secretary that looks like that.

Tell that to all the people suffering from obesity. I don't think it's a stretch to call Col. Saunders, Ray Crock or Dave Thomas mass-murderers, not for serving ultra-unhealthy food, but for mass-marketting it to kids from the youngest age and distorting their tastes, making them overweight junk-food addicts as adults.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a/. story on, say, hampster dance in a few years. Not only has that video been around for years, but Darl Mcbride even referred to it in his "open letter" not long ago:

A popular animation
on the Internet features a guy named Steve, the Linux Super Villain.
During the course of the 60 second animation, he describes his work
with Linux stating, "First you have to config it, then write some
shell scripts, update your RPMs, partition your drives, patch your
kernel, compile your binaries and check your version dependencies..."

Being a long time comics reader and supervillain myself (well, wannabe, anyway), I believe in Linux!Kim Polese used this at her talk announcing SpikeSource last year. I had just downloaded it a few days before myself, so when I listened to the MP3 of her talk and heard this come on, I was like, "Oh, cool, Kim!"

I count Kim as a "gorgeous fembot" for this coolness.

Sadly, Linux has not yet improved my love life.

But the orbiting brain laser research is going well on Mandrake 10.1 - to be upgraded to 2006 when i

It is pretty funny. Remember, this was made 3 years ago, when a lot of that was still true. He's not making up fud. Back when he made it, lots of those problems were existant. Linux is much better off now, having improved greatly in the last three years (from last year to this year, a lot has changed even). Three years ago, lots of the things that are easy today were much harder.

Remember, this was made 3 years ago, when a lot of that was still true. He's not making up fud. Back when he made it, lots of those problems were existant. Linux is much better off now, having improved greatly in the last three years (from last year to this year, a lot has changed even).

It's a lot better now, but part of the reason I thought this was funny (although I'd seen it long ago) was that I spent all night installing Ubuntu on a laptop I got for free when we cleaned house at work.

But KDE and Gnome go down all the time. It's not really fair to talk about applications....Like in Linux, the base system can often save the rest.

For most desktop use, though, an X crash (which is probably what you mean by "KDE and Gnome go down all the time") wipes out all your unsaved work and demands a reboot, just as a full-blown operating system crash does. The hair-splitting about "completely crash" doesn't change that.

The bitching about BSODs goes back to when Linux use involved running vi in an xterm in FVWM on barebones video cards. In those days, the GUI really was rock-solid (and Windows was really as flimsy as people made out).

Perhaps you could enlighten me as to why an X crash demands a reboot or even wipes out all your work. My work? I use emacs inside a screen. Even if X dies a horrible death (which I've managed to pull off twice in the last six months by purposely attempting to use drivers labelled as experimental or not quite for my card) it's no different than if your ftpd choked. Restart and move on.

...and because after a few years I noticed I never use this my window manager now is ratpoison which removes all this resize, overlap, move bullshit and just keeps switch (and tile but I don't use that either 99% of the time).

Obviously if you're using Windows and your GDI server crashes you are not going to be able to use the Command Prompt application. So why do you seem to think that a crashed X server could ever possibly allow you to use xterm?

I don't. That's the point. The common argument that if X crashes, your OS hasn't crashed is a strawman. Most users apps are going to be running in X anyways.

The "console environment" is the virtual console layer, which is separate from X. That's what he's talking about. I have no rea

Perhaps you could enlighten me as to why an X crash demands a reboot or even wipes out all your work.

Note that I prefaced my comment with "For most desktop use, though..." Most desktop use uses the GUI and an X crash wipes out all your work. Most desktop users don't have a second computer to ssh in and kill the locked-up X on the first.

If the "At last, Linux Is Ready For The Desktop!" crowd wishes to add a caveat that "...as long as you do all your work in screen and have two computers" -- then, yeah, Linu

"Most desktop users don't have a second computer to ssh in and kill the locked-up X on the first."

Uhm, who needs ssh? Switch to a virtual terminal and kill the X process.

Trivial (assuming the end user knows about virtual terminals and ls and kill -9 - and those ARE things a new user should learn even if 99% of their time is spent in X - just like a new Windows user should know about the Recovery Console.)

When X crashes, you do Alt-F1 to bring up a virtual terminal which is a CONSOLE app, and then you kill X. It has nothing to do with whether the X server is responding to keyboard input - you're using kill -9 from the console to tell the kernel to kill the job.

It's done every day by somebody somewhere. I've done it on rare occasions when X has locked up.

And whether you lose your work or not depends on the app that's running. Many editors, for insta

You do realise that there's other desktop environments and window managers than KDE/Gnome, right? I find that those two DEs go down fairly frequently as well. Since switching to XFCE, however, I have never had a crash. Ever. It's absolutely rock-solid, and as long as it's development is focused on speed and stability over, say, bells&whistles, it's going to continue to be rock-solid.

And if you don't like XFCE, there's nothing to stop you from using *box, fvwm, or hell, even tab-window-manager. Maybe your problems with X have less to do with X or Linux themselves, and more to do with your choice of using Desktop Environments with known memory leaks (KDE) and stability problems when dealing with unexpected library versions (Gnome).

And in the event of an X crash, I wouldn't lose my documents, either. At most, I'd lose 5 minutes' work, because that's the interval at which AbiWord is set to autosave my work. Hell, my music wouldn't even stop playing, thanks to me using MPD.

You do realise that there's other desktop environments and window managers than KDE/Gnome, right?Only if Linux is your hobby. Something it will never be, and shouldn't be, for the vast majority of people.

"What? Grandma? You're having problems with the Linux box I conned you into buying? It doesn't work as well as your Windows one did? Well, you ignorant slut, don't you realize that the KDE and Gnome that came preinstalled are crap? Those are crashing, not your computer. You don't know the d

I also note that the parent post is being modded down for not preaching the joys of Linux...I would gladly have spent a mod point on "underrated" it if I hadn't spent all mine in the "Google + iTunes" story.

The parent post is modded down because it's a pack of lies... that's all...

I seem to remember that it downloads an installer, but it has been a while... The problem on GNU/Linux is (as always) traced back to non-free software, once (and if) there is a mature free software flash player you can be sure that you won't have to explicitly install it on any desktop distro.

To clarify, though it's already been done, the animation you saw is a Flash animation. Flash does and always has run fine on Linux, though the releases are somewhat behind the windows and mac releases. Shockwave is an entirely different thing (by the same company), and there is no linux player. Last I checked (which was over a year ago) it worked with CrossOver, but that put up ads in the middle of what you were doing.

Since you asked, I use Gentoo, and it was about a day old (gotta love emerge --sync

True, the.swf file format does stand for shockwave flash. However, this is a flash animation; a shockwave animation is something quite different. This was an animation that was produced via macromedia flash, and runs in their flash player.

A shockwave animation is one that is produced in Macromedia Director, and requires an entirely different plugin.

They're separate products and separate file formats. The flash format (which is far more common) is vector based, and was designed to stream interesting animations to people while using up as little bandwidth as possible. Similarly, the flash player itself is (or at least originally was) designed to be as small as possible.

In contrast, the shockwave player was designed from the start to handle lots of stuff (bitmaps, vectors, 3d) and so was always a much heavier player.

So anyway, the parent post is right, I think. This is a FLASH animation, not a shockwave animation. Calling this a shockwave animation in the headline is misleading.

It's actually flash rather than shockwave, stupid inaccurate summary. I assure you there is no shockwave player for linux, if there was I'd be playing miniclip's horribly addictive word leaves game right now.